Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

I

The adventure of journalism which has been mine—as editor, reporter, and war correspondent—is never a life of easy toil and seldom one of rich rewards. I would not recommend it to youth as a primrose path, nor to anyone who wishes to play for safety in possession of an assured income, regular hours, and happy home life.

It is of uncertain tenure, because no man may hold on to his job if he weakens under the nervous strain, or quarrels on a point of honor with the proprietor who pays him or with the editor who sets his task. Even the most successful journalist—if he is on the writing side of a newspaper—can rarely bank on past achievements, however long and brilliant, but must forever jerk his brain and keep his curiosity untired.

As nobody, according to the proverb, has ever seen a dead donkey, so nobody has ever seen a retired reporter living on the proceeds of his past toil, like business men in other adventures of life. He must go on writing and recording, getting news until the pen drops from his hand, or the little bell tinkles for the last time on his typewriter, and his head falls over an unfinished sentence.... Well, I hope that will happen to me, but some people look forward to an easier old age.

I have known the humiliation of journalism, its insecurity, its never-ending tax upon the mind and heart, its squalor, its fever, its soul-destroying machinery for those who are not proof against its cruelties. Hundreds of times, as a young reporter, I was stretched to the last pull of nervous energy on some “story” which was wiped out for more important news. Often I went without food and sleep, suffered in health of body and mind, girded myself to audacities from which, as a timid soul, I shrank, in order to get a “scoop”—which failed.

The young reporter has to steel his heart to these disappointments. He must not agonize too much if, after a day and night of intense and nervous effort, he finds no line of his work in the paper, or sees his choicest prose hacked and mangled by impatient subeditors, or his truth-telling twisted into falsity.

He is the slave of the machine. Home life is not for him, as for other men. He may have taken unto himself a wife—poor girl!—but though she serves his little dinner all piping hot, he has to leave the love feast for the bleak streets, if the voice of the news editor calls down the telephone.

So, at least, it was in my young days as a reporter on London newspapers, and many a time in those days I cursed the fate which had taken me to Fleet Street as a slave of the press.

Several times I escaped; taking my courage in both hands—and it needed courage, remembering a wife and babe—I broke with the spell of journalism and retired into quieter fields of literary life.

But always I went back! The lure of the adventure was too strong. The thrill of chasing the new “story,” the interest of getting into the middle of life, sometimes behind the scenes of history, the excitement of recording sensational acts in the melodrama of reality, the meetings with heroes, rogues, and oddities, the front seats at the peep show of life, the comedy, the change, the comradeship, the rivalry, the test of one’s own quality of character and vision, drew me back to Fleet Street as a strong magnet.